Greener Than Thou: West Coast Green Peddles Prefab

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Greener Than Thou is our report on San Francisco’s obsession with all things green, calling bullshit in the poseurs and lavishing praise on those who have secured their place in environmental paradise. Let it mellow longer than most? Holler!

Shipping container homes, a longtime Curbed LA obsession, have established a Bay Area beachhead at the three-day West Coast Green convention, which kicks off tomorrow in San Jose. The show's centerpiece: Harbinger, a two-story, 1,700-square-foot house built from five reused shipping containers. While we ponder whether this "prefabricated steel box truss" house is a portent of things to come, some fun facts: the heavy-gauge steel the containers are made from is usually too expensive to use as a building material, but we conveniently have a glut of shipping containers left over from all the stuff we're buying from China; the containers go for $500 to $200 apiece, but in total, it's only about 5 percent cheaper to build a container house rather than a wood-frame one. Still— it's 40 percent faster. Will we ever see a shipping container home in San Francisco? Consider our eyes peeled.
· Shipping container prefab at West Coast Green [SF Gate]
· Wild Card: Exercise in "Adaptive Reuse" [Curbed SF]
· Greener Than Thou: East Bay Container (Green)house [Curbed SF]
· Floor Plan Porn: Super Freak in So Cal [Curbed SF]